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I was in London for a podcast record and a book launch. I had time to walk from Kings Cross to Leicester Square and more importantly the energy to do so. I keep being surprised that when you fuel your body with healthy food then you feel good. It's so fucking obvious. Yet somehow I've spent 56 years still eating crap (at least occasionally) even when I am on a diet. The weight loss to this non-calorie controlled diet still amazes me 7.2kg in 7 weeks, but the feeling of well being is (I know I've said it before) like being on some kind of contentment drug. The walk just filled me with more euphoria. Plus I bumped into Dara O Briain near Euston and had a nice chat with him. A man recognised Dara and then on passing us recognised me and looked amazed to get a two for one deal. He'd have been more amazed if he'd known our own meeting was a coincidence.
I'd already witnessed two women almost walk into the path of a lorry outside Kings Cross, but I wondered how Dara would feel if I got into an accident on my walk (for some reason my chosen imagined cause of death was being felled by a falling bit of masonry from a building) - he would blame himself for setting me on a path with my destiny. As it was, perhaps by stopping me for three or four minutes he'd actually saved my life. We'll have to assume it was the latter, as here I am. Thanks Dara.
Further along my walk I saw my producer Ben walking towards me. We'd just been emailing each other this morning, so it seemed doubly weird that we'd bump into each other. I'd taken a very random path towards my destination and had no idea that I was in the square where Ben was currently working. If it was a coincidence it seemed a meaningless one, but also a weird one. London is a big place and there are lots of people I know here, but practically bumping into two of them on a 40 minute walk seemed unlikely. I wonder what accident Ben saved me from. It must have been something, because look, here I am.
This all put me in the right frame of mind because I was on my way to talk to Dan Schreiber for his "We Can Be Weirdos" podcast. Coincidentally, I realised as we sat down, on my walk I'd been listening to "Weirdo" by Sara Pascoe. Coincidentally Dan noticed it on my screen and said he was reading it too. Maybe not too much of a coincidence given all three of us are weirdos, but still. We talked for two hours about the ghosts in my house and me going to Fiji to avoid the predictions of Nostradamus and how I sometimes predict minor things like mugs breaking (weirdly someone tweeted me a picture of the SDP mug they had bought from me on ebay smashed on the floor round about the same time we'd had this discussion). I talked about the chances of us living in a simulation (high) and whether it might be possible that we're actually the only self-conscious and intelligent life forms in the universe. Plus the madness behind stone clearing and self playing snooker and ventriloquism and how, as unlikely as it seems, in real life I am fairly well-balanced and not insane. So far. Most of the time.
Catie and me then met up to go to the launch of Mary Beard's latest book. Absolute delight to see her.
I got home to remember that Catie had told me that the toilet that we've had fixed three times in the last year was malfunctioning again. This time the flush was broken and it water was continuously flowing into the bowl. The cistern is accessed from the room behind the bathroom and so I had to get Phoebe out of bed to try and find a way to stop it. Panels had to be removed, I had to work out how to get the top of the cistern and then just fish around and touch things until the water stopped. I managed it, so was a hero (though no one pointed it out). Otherwise we'd have all been kept awake by the sound of cascading water and the continuous grind of the Saniflo. It's cost us so much already and it looks like costing us more (though hopeful that the company that replaced the cistern will be liable to do this for free if the parts have failed so quickly). Maybe it's the toilet that has been haunting us all along. Or maybe the ghosts in our house are just annoyed that I was talking about them again. Again it happened while I was talking about them this afternoon.
